Top Gear meets the DeltaWing

Sam Philip goes on track with the car that could rewrite racing... or end up on its roof

In 2008, sick of poring over IndyCar's ever-expanding rulebook to figure out which gaps in the regulations might yield a few milliseconds per lap, and concerned that motor racing was becoming increasingly out of touch, Bowlby began to investigate the possibility of a racer with IndyCar pace but using - instead of a 600bhp naturally aspirated V8 - the FIA's then-nascent ‘world engine', the 300bhp, 1.6-litre turbo four-cylinder now employed in the WRC.

Bowlby rapidly realised that, to design a race car with half the power but all the speed, he'd have to rip up and set fire to the How to Build a Racing Car manual. Balancing that equation would require a car half the weight of a conventional racer, generating half the drag. On the plus side, he calculated, such a racer would also burn half the fuel and put only half the wear on its tyres.